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Walking Tall with Kevin Hart

The biggest little man in Hollywood (and that’s saying something) is having one gigantic year

Backstage in the funhouse green room at _Jimmy Kimmel Live!, you might expect to find Kevin Hart sipping a drink or jamming the joy stick on Donkey Kong Junior. Instead, with just minutes to go before he appears on national TV, the 34-year-old comedian is pacing around a private dressing room, hard at work on a script—Ballers—about a fantasy basketball camp. _I pull up a chair as Hart, in black jeans and a grey t-shirt, bounces back and forth, his weight on the balls of his feet. “Multitasking!” he explains, as his friend Chris Spencer—an actor/comedian who co-created the BET spoof show _Real Husbands of Hollywood with Hart—_holds up an iPad, videotaping Hart’s every word.

Hart and Spencer are writing the movie together—a comedy about two brothers, one very tall, the other very short, which will star LeBron James and, maybe, Hart himself “depending on schedules.” They’ve been at it all day, spitballing dialogue and story beats as they roll around Los Angeles in what Hart’s publicist calls his “mobile command center”: a customized Mercedes Benz Sprinter. They’re wrestling with the mid-point of the movie—whether “some shit that looks bad ends up good,” as Spencer puts it, “or some shit that’s good is really bad.” They need “a Dodgeball moment,” they both agree, like the one when Vince Vaughan fails to show up for the championship game, jeopardizing his team’s chance at the title. Not long after I arrive—and just minutes before Hart is due on Kimmel’s couch—they hit on an idea, swearing me to secrecy. “Dude, we knocked down some major walls,” Hart tells Spencer, reaching for his ringing phone. It’s Etan Cohen, the director of Get Hard, a movie he’s about to start shooting with Will Ferrell.

“More multitasking,” Hart whispers to me, then gives Cohen a few notes on the script, about a wealthy banker (Ferrell) who prepares to do prison time with help from the guy (Hart) who washes his car. Hart is hoping his “thuggish” character can behave in ways the audience won’t expect: giving investment advice, for example. “That’s not the stale, typical way that you’ve seen thugs interact with the quote-unquote white guy in a comedy,” Hart tells Cohen.

Hart is a tireless promoter of his projects, which is why he’s here tonight: to convince Kimmel’s viewers to go see About Last Night, a remake of the 1986 dramedy, which will open 24 hours later, making a solid $48 million ($36 million more than it cost to produce). It will be Hart’s second box-office win of 2014 (in January, his and Ice Cube’s buddy-cop movie Ride Along had the biggest opening of the month, and pulled in a total of $127 million). Now, glancing at a TV monitor, Hart notices that Kimmel’s show has begun. “Listen,” he tells Cohen politely, “I got to get dressed.” He hangs up and unbuttons his fly.

“I’m going to drop my pants,” he says to me. “Don’t get scared.” And off come his clothes, which he hangs neatly on a hanger. Before me in Calvin Klein briefs is a taut, tat-covered man who hits the gym at 5:30 every morning. I must go mute for a second because suddenly Hart is laughing. “You can still talk,” he teases, urging me not to waste valuable interview time as he slips into a Paul Smith suit that looks like it was sewn onto him.

“Maximize!” he commands. “Maximize!”

Last year, when Hart released his fourth stand-up “concert” movie, Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, it included testimonials from people around the world who’d seen his sold-out 2012 tour. One by one, fans in Vancouver, Montreal, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Birmingham and London told how they’d discovered Hart on YouTube. They quoted his signature lines—“You goin’ learn today!” and “Real, Rap, Raw!” —and squealed that they loved him. You can’t get much whiter than the audiences in Scandinavia, and Hart acknowledges that at many arenas on that comedic marathon, he “didn’t see a single black soul.” He says he has internalized something Chris Rock once told him: the only thing all people have in common, regardless of race, gender, faith, politics or sexual preference, is that they like to laugh. Hart wants a core audience of everyone.

Same with Hart, whose best material is rooted in vulnerability. Often he uses his height – he’s five feet five – as a springboard into his phobias, which include ostriches (“big-ass man-pigeons”), women who go from being frantic to calm “real fast,” and getting knocked out in front of his children. Self-deprecating in the extreme, he’s always tapping into an emotional undercurrent that makes him relatable. “Kevin has a great relationship with the audience. Like, he is the audience,” says Rock, who cast him in the upcoming comedy Finally Famous, which Rock wrote and directed.

When you talk to people who know Hart well, one thing that always comes up is his hyper-focused approach to stardom. Tim Story, who’s directed Hart in Ride Along and two other comedies (2012’s _Think Like a Man _and its sequel, which premieres June 20), agrees. He says Hart “speaks to the everyman, and I think it transcends race. As people become more familiar with his work, they just go, ‘I get this guy.’ ” (That goes for women, too; unexpectedly, 57 percent of the audience for Ride Along was female). The two men met in 2010, after Hart reached out to see if Story might direct his third concert movie, Laugh at My Pain. When the two men sat down, Story was struck by Hart’s studious approach to stardom. “He’s studied the business of film and, more specifically, the route that a comedian takes—not just the successes, but the failures,” Story says. “The guy has a plan.”

The plan is multi-faceted, and it’s been percolating for a long time. Seth Rogen, who’s known Hart since 2001, when Judd Apatow cast them both in his short-lived TV series Undeclared, says that Hart “was the first guy I ever met that had a production company. You’d call his cell phone and another guy would answer, ‘Hartbeat Productions!’ And you’d be like, ‘Is Kevin there?’ And the guy would hand him the phone. He’s always been like that, even when he was a stand-up comic from Philly who I’d never fucking heard of.”

Hartbeat Productions might have seemed an affectation then, but to Hart it was a stab at self-determination. Today it is a growing entertainment company whose tentacles extend into film production (Hart financed his last two concert movies himself) and television (Real Husbands of Hollywood has been renewed for a third season; ABC is planning an upcoming series based on his life). Stand-up comedy, Hart says, has “put me in a position to own, to do, to get.” And soon he’s planning a full-on cyber-invasion.

“Operation take over the entertainment world is officially in session!” he tweeted recently to his 10 million Twitter followers, who are joined by 19 million on Facebook, Instagram and Vine. He was referring to his intention to launch a website—kind of a black Funny or Die—where his fans can go to laugh, sure, but also to buy concert tickets, games, apps, music. Hart imagines himself as not just an actor or a comedian, but a mogul in the making, the CEO of his own company, the master of his own domain, a brand. He admires Will Smith and Denzel Washington, no doubt, but when you ask who he’s modeling his career after, Jay Z and Beyoncé and Tyler Perry and Sean Puffy Combs are the names he drops.

Work hard, don’t dawdle, maximize – Hart didn’t invent this worldview, he learned it from his mother, Nancy. Kevin was eight when his mom kicked his dad, Henry, a cocaine addict, out of the house. After that, she raised Kev and his brother Robert in northeastern Philadelphia mostly by herself. When her older son acted out, Nancy—a systems analyst at the University of Pennsylvania—doubled down on Kevin, maximizing her younger son’s extracurricular activities to keep him away from trouble. For Kevin, there would be no hanging on the corner. Instead, there was swim team, homework, “forced” reading. “I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist,” Hart says, adding: “I am who I am today because of my mother.”

He’d always been the cut up. “I didn’t have clothes. I didn’t have women knocking at my door. I was the funny one. That’s it.” Then, when he was 15, he saw Eddie Murphy Delirious. “I saw a crowd go crazy. I didn’t know then I wanted to do stand-up comedy. I was just in awe of the presence that he had. He commanded your attention the minute he walked out.”

Hart was a lackluster student. He says not applying himself was the only way he’d figured out to rebel. But while he graduated high school with a C average, his mom was adamant that he continue his education. He enrolled briefly in community college, then got a job selling shoes. His co-workers at City Sports thought he was funny; they pushed him to try stand-up at a local spot that had an amateur night, the Laff House.

“I didn’t know how to write a joke. I just had thoughts: the pervert guy on the bus who wants to grind on people. Or: black people who get Chinese tattoos and don’t know what they say, walking around with salt/pepper/ketchup on their arms,” says Hart, who was then known as Lil’ Kev. From his first night on stage, he says, he knew he had to be a comedian.

His mom was skeptical, but agreed to pay his $400-a-month rent for a year. If it didn’t work out, they agreed, he’d finally go to college. That’s when he met Keith Robinson, a well-connected comic who’d happened into the Laff House one night. Robinson told Hart he was funny, but wasn’t memorable because his jokes were about…nothing. He offered to take him to New York to see how the pros did it, and soon, the two men were commuting six nights a week in Robinson’s Ford Focus to drop into the Comic Strip, Dangerfield’s, Carolines, Gotham.

One night, at the Comedy Cellar, Hart got up and did a set in front of a packed house of veteran comics: Rich Vos, Patrice O’Neal, Jim Norton, Bill Burr, Colin Quinn, Robert Kelly and Robinson. Afterwards, they took him into a back room and subjected him to a ritual they called “Hack Court.” Basically, Hart was put on trial for his crimes against comedy. He had a favorite joke about a cross-eyed midget. “Lose it,” the elders ruled. “It stinks.” Hart flinched, but didn’t protest.

“If you give Kev an assignment, he’s going to work overnight,” Robinson tells me. “50 Cent has a lyric: I wonder can you feel my hunger. I could feel his hunger. Not to be famous, but to be the best.”

Hart kept grinding, pocketing $25 a show. Eventually he signed with a manager, and soon he was taking meetings in L.A. with TV networks. CBS made the first offer: $125,000. Take it, Hart said. Calm down, the manager said. Ultimately, Hart signed a development deal with ABC for $225,000 and moved to L.A., feeling flush. “I’m rich!” he recalls thinking. He gave his mom some money, then blew through the rest. “I don’t know where the hell it went,” he says. “It’s all in throwback jerseys and bomber jackets. That’s why I have so much respect for money now.”

Around this time, Judd Apatow cast Hart in a pilot about struggling actors called North Hollywood. Hart would play a comic who was roommates with Jason Segel (Amy Poehler and Judge Reinhold co-starred). To prepare his actors, method-style, Apatow had Hart move in to Segel’s actual apartment. “I asked them to do it for a week,” the writer-director says. “I forget how many days they lasted.” (Hart isn’t sure either, but he recalls this: “I made him pancakes.”) The pilot didn’t get picked up, but Apatow’s Undeclared did. Hart was cast as the Luke, the religious kid. The series, a cult hit that starred many, like Rogen, who are still in the Apatow stable, lasted just six episodes.

Then Hart landed his own show on ABC, TheBig House, in which he played a wealthy Malibu kid who goes to live with his working class relatives in Philly. He thought he’d finally made it when the network flew him to New York to pitch the show at the Upfronts, the annual dog-and-pony show held to lure advertisers. Wanting to be a team player, Hart flew the rest of the cast there, too, on his own dime. Then, literally seconds before he was supposed to go onstage to promote the show, it was canceled.

“I’d bought my first suit, and I’m ready to go out and be like, ‘Yeah! New shit!’ And they tapped me on my back. And this isn’t the president of the network. This isn’t the vice president. This is the guy with the headset,” he says, mimicking the stage manager who approached, on the orders of someone talking in his ear, and said, “Hey, Kev, they decided to go in a different direction.’” A few months later, his debut as a leading man on the big screen, the 2004 comedy Soul Plane, tanked. “I was in actor’s jail,” he says. “I couldn’t get a job, you know?”

It was during this period, Hart says, that he made a decision. “I figured it out when I was waiting for the phone calls, waiting for somebody to go, ‘We want to do this.’ That’s a bad feeling for me,” he says. He’d watched his father, who was in and out of jail when he was young, fail to provide for his family. Now, Hart had started his own family—he’d gotten married in 2003—and he felt the need to step it up. “It was cause and effect,” he says. “It was not making the same mistakes that I saw somebody make in front of my face.” Never again would he be “just talent.”

To enter Hart’s house is to be greeted by the greats of black stand-up comedy. In the foyer—a massive space with two imposing staircases that curve upward like a set of marble parentheses—there are several paintings. One is of Richard Pryor. Another is of Eddie Murphy. Chris Rock, Redd Foxx, Bernie Mac—they’re all there, just inside the front door.

Hart’s home is big and beautiful—seven bedrooms, seven baths, in a gated community not far from Mulholland Drive—but because it’s in Tarzana, in the San Fernando Valley, not in Beverly Hills, he paid just $2 million for it (a pittance, by A-lister standards). We’ve stopped here two hours before the premiere of About Last Night because Hart wants to sees his kids, Heaven and Hendrix, ages 9 and 6. He and their mother, the actress Torrei Hart, divorced in 2011, but they share custody and are on good terms. “We’re very happy in the Hart household right now,” Hart says, acknowledging that happy or sad, everything that happens is potential material for his stand-up films, the last two of which he co-financed, earning at least $20 million. He’s constantly making notes on his phone for what will eventually be his fifth stand-up movie, a project he’s nicknamed Hour Number Five. Often those notes involve his kids.

A while back, Hart saw that what his mentor Keith Robinson had said was right: his act was better when he used his life as a way to talk about something meaningful. (How to argue with your woman, for example: “I’m not a good storm-outer…because I forget stuff,” goes one of his riffs, in which he acts out the humiliation of slinking back in to retrieve his car keys.) His first concert movie, I’m a Grown Little Man, dealt with his early years of marriage; his second, Seriously Funny, delved into fatherhood and the strain kids put on romance; in his third, Laugh at My Pain, he talked about reconciling with his father and about his mother’s death, from cancer in 2007. In Let Me Explain, he tackled being single again. “I grew up in front of you,” he says. “And if I didn’t do that, I’m not doing my job.”

Now, in his huge kitchen, which is littered with open backpacks, sneakers, alphabet charts, and a take-out bag from P.F. Chang’s, he yells for his daughter. “Hurry up, Heaven! Come on! Let me see it!” A teacher has alerted him that his daughter is making careless mistakes, and he wants to check her math homework. When she appears, sharp in her school uniform, and hands it over, he finds seventeen errors. “Practice good habits!” he says, and suddenly, you can feel the presence of his mother in the room. “Do it twice,” he says, encouraging yet iron-fisted. “Just because you do it once, doesn’t mean it’s right.”

“Yes, daddy,” says the girl, as her brother runs in, grinning, and hides behind the couch. After Hart gives Heaven a few more problems, all of which she aces, he smiles. “Why are you laughing?” the girl demands. “Because you understand it, you just aren’t writing it,” Hart tells her. “You see how you took your time and got to it?”

What makes this career moment so delicious, he says, is that it’s taken him so long. “Things have been in the process of being built for 10, 11 years now,” he tells me. And he’s had to break rules to break through – namely the Hollywood dictum, “Never spend your own money.” When Hart decided to make his third stand-up film, he talked to several studios about putting up the financing, but when no one bit, he bet on himself. He invested $750,000 to shoot and edit Laugh at My Pain, then distributed it through AMC Theaters in 2011; the film made $8 million at the box-office and sold “astronomically,” he says, on DVD. While touring the world in 2012, he spent $2.5 million to make Let Me Explain, his fourth concert movie. Last year, it raked in $32 million. Theater owners typically take 60 percent of box-office receipts. Do the math or, like Heaven, do it twice: Hart took home at least $10 million.

“I’m a firm believer that when your time is supposed to come, it’s going to come,” Hart tells me, and when I reach Ice Cube, Hart’s Ride Along co-star, he picks up on the same theme. “You’ve got to respect that Kevin wants to take the long road, because there’s longevity in the long road,” he says. “When you go straight to the top, you don’t see what it takes sometimes to get there. You just know how far it is to fall. He loves that mountain that he’s climbing.”

When it’s time to leave for the premiere, we pile into Hart’s tricked out Sprinter. Designed to seat twelve, the “party bus” has been customized for his comfort: dark hardwood floors, leather walls, satellite TV, WiFi, a bar, a fridge, a couch, and two fifty-inch televisions. He bought it last year after getting a DUI, a misstep that he describes as unconscionably stupid. So he made a decision: No more driving. Since then, the chauffeured Benz “has become my serenity,” he says. He works on board, building his empire while stuck in traffic. And he sleeps better here than anywhere else, despite the vehicle’s wobbly suspension.

“I have to take Dramamine when I’m in here,” says his girlfriend, the model-actress Eniko Parrish, making a queasy face. “But he’s spoiled in it—his man cave on wheels.”

No doubt, the comedian looks happy and resplendent tonight in a scarlet Dolce & Gabbana Gold outfit so flashy that his buddy Harry Ratchford just greeted him like this: “Well! You’ve got the shiny suit on, yo.” Ratchford has been riding with Hart all day, as has Parrish, who is shiny in a different way: a draped silver halter dress that clings to her slim body with the help of a beaded chain. As the bus heads east to the historic, golf-ball-shaped Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, Hart reflects on the long road.

“I’ve been meeting the same people at all these studios, all the television networks—the same presidents, the same show runners, the same network ecs—for damn near ten years,” he says. “And now, it all comes full circle.”

Minutes later, working the press line in front of the theater, he’s dialed his manic, vibrating energy up to full volume—joking about this movie being a departure (“I’m having sex in this film! A bunch of it!”) and dispensing, um, relationship advice (“Know how to knock your baby’s back loose!”)—when along comes Clint Culpepper, the Sony ec whose division is releasing tonight’s film. Culpepper is beaming in his slim dark suit. “I am so excited,” he announces, “I could pee my pants!” His boss, the studio chief Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and one of the most powerful people in town, is two feet away. Hart’s made five movies with Sony, but this is the first time Pascal has attended one of his premieres. When Culpepper steers his star into Pascal’s arms, she hugs Hart warmly, like they’re old friends, then flashes her best we-want-to-be-in-the-Kevin-Hart-business smile. “I’ve got some people to introduce you to,” she says, holding both Hart’s hands for a moment before she lets him go.

Chris Rock told me that he’s recently urged Hart to take explicit advantage of the heat his box-office success has created. “I said, ‘This is your moment. Get on the phone, call Tarantino, call a bunch of directors, just tell them you’re interested.’” But Hart tells me hasn’t done it. With all due respect to the many filmmakers he admires, he’s building his own team, he says—a group of funny friends that have been with him since he was at the bottom. “That’s why it’s so hard to infiltrate my system now,” he tells me, “because I know that what I have around me is really genuine.” The Plastic Cup Boys, as they call themselves, can be seen on YouTube playing pickup basketball with the likes of Chris Brown or egging Hart on when he adopts his alter ego, the fearsome rapper Chocolate Drop, and challenges T-Pain to a duel. Hart prides himself on bringing these guys—Chris Spencer, Harry Ratchford, Joey Wells, William “Spank” Horton, Na’Im Lynn and Dwayne Brown—along as he gains altitude. (Spencer, Ratchford and Wells are in the Writers Guild now, too, thanks to Hart).

“Let me read you a text conversation,” Hart says, whipping out his phone to show me how he and Ratchford prod each other to work harder. “This is Harry: ‘Get the fuck up. You think because you’re on a little promo tour that that’s going to be enough? Huh? Because you got two movies coming out, you think that’s going to be enough?’ This is me: ‘I’m up. I’m going to hit the office. You wake the fuck up.’ Harry: ‘I’m still in the office creating, ho. You still in your castle sleeping. Sweet dreams, bitch.’ Me: ‘Can’t be outworked.’ ”

Confidently, Hart forecasts the future, saying it won’t be long before his company will “have the same capability of the Netflis and the Hulus.” His website, which he has dubbed ThatShit.com until he can decide on a name, will help his fans cut through the clutter of an Internet that provides too much of everything (“I’ve typed in the strangest shit in the world on YouTube, and they got it. ‘Trash in ass’ is a guy shitting out trash. What the hell?”). Chocolate Drop, who was “raised by two pitbulls,” may debut his world premiere music video on the site, Hart says. “It’s called, ‘Bitch, that Car is Mine.’ ” Give Hart one to three years, he says, and “I promise you, I will have something on the Internet that is game-changing. I can’t lose.”